12 minute read
GAME CHANGER
TO RECHARGE, YOU HAVE TO UNPLUG Tech workers dish on managing stress
BY DWAIN HEBDA
Of all the things he loves about his job, the hustle might be Josh Whitehurst’s drug of choice. “I like aggressive deadlines,” says Whitehurst, product analyst for North Little Rock-based First Orion. “I’ve noticed that personality trait in most of my co-workers, too. They operate well with a lot going on.”
For people like Whitehurst, it doesn’t get any better than when he’s feeding the dragon of a demanding professional life. Even as coronavirus has sequestered many to their homes, technology has allowed tech workers to produce almost without missing a step. And that connectivity, like all enablers, is the problem when it comes to stress and burnout.
“Being a technology company, there are very few places in the world I can go to escape my work,” he said. “A stressor for me is always being connected. I love what I do. I love who I work with. But that in no way, shape, or form means I want to hear from that side of my life 24/7.
“It’s a weird dichotomy that I’m stuck in right now. My phone and my computer turn into both a savior and a curse, at the same time.”
IN THE ARENA of public perception, some industries walk hand firmly in hand with long hours, compulsive work habits, and nearly superhuman demands. The tech industry is near the top of that list and with good reason; last year Blind, a workplace app for tech employees, posed a one-question survey to its users, which include more than 100,000 employees from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Uber, and Facebook alone. That question: “Are you currently experiencing burnout?” Nearly six in 10 responded, “Yes.”
This isn’t a surprise in an industry where the culture of top-tier companies is built on 100hour workweeks and lavish corporate campuses replace many comforts of the outside world, giving workers less motivation to go home. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said as much in a 2016 interview about her time at Google. “When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if [hard work] was inevitable,” Mayer said. “The actual experience was more like, ‘Could you work 130 hours in a week?’ The answer is ‘yes’ if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
While acknowledging such examples as extreme, Whitehurst says that workaholism is to some degree endemic throughout the tech industry. “The nature of the technical world, as a whole, is technology is moving so fast, it is everything that we can do as people to keep up with it. If I were to show you what I was working on this week, it would look entirely different next week. But the magnitude of the work being done would not change.”
Joe Ehrhardt, CEO of Teslar Software in Springdale, says that while individual companies can’t change everything about such a marketplace, they can support a culture that recognizes the needs of the individual while meeting the demands of the project.
“Anytime I hire people, we talk about quality of life,” he says. “I say we’re busy, we’re going to work pretty hard, but I don’t ever expect you to miss a kid’s track meet, play, any of that. We’ll schedule anything and everything around that. Those are events that you’ll never get back.
“I tell people one of the cool things about working for a tech startup is I might need you to work until midnight tonight, but tomorrow you might want to take the day off and go fishing with your kids. Now I will tell you, if you talk to my team members right now, they would tell you the job is hard because of COVID. But I would be very sad if I ever heard of a team member who missed a major event because of work.”
Ehrhardt also understands the nature of his employees such that he manages projects strategically to keep people motivated and not just running on a hamster wheel. “Tech people, and I’m one of them, love everything new. They like new projects,” he says. “So, one of the ways to prevent burnout is to make sure that you’re rotating yourself and other people to new and exciting things and not getting people stuck in a rut.
“But I think it’s not just one thing. You’ve got to have balance. You’ve got to have a good company culture. Your work has to feel like it has a purpose. People have to feel like they’re making a difference. And it’s got to have some excitement. When you’re working hard, if you don’t have those things, you’ll burn out real fast.” Priorities Promote Balance
Over his tech career, Cabot native Chris Bidenbender has worked as a consultant, part of a startup, and in the corporate environment, all while being a single dad. We asked the software engineer with Simmons Bank how he keeps it all in balance.
SET BOUNDARIES: Too often, workers are afraid to speak up for what’s really important to them. Bidenbender staked out the one week per month his son lives with him as off-limits. “On my week, he gets out of school and I pick him up from daycare about 5:00 or 5:30. So from 5:00 to essentially 8:30, I’m not available,” he says. “I’m available if the end of the world happens, but otherwise I’m not going to answer my phone, not going to look at it.”
GIVE AND TAKE: At the same time, Bidenbender says there are ways to meet your employer halfway without letting it encroach on the time you’ve set aside as your own. “When my son goes to bed, I’m on again. If something needs to be worked on, I can stay up and work late if I need to,” he says. “Another thing, wherever I’ve been if we knew we were going to have a really rough weekend I immediately volunteered to work if I didn’t have my son. That counteracted the times I couldn’t work.”
DECIDE WHAT’S IMPORTANT: Periodically take inventory of what you really want in life. Understand some jobs may not be right for you, and know your priorities will change over time. “It can be hard when you’re younger, you don’t make much money and you’re trying to establish yourself, or in the startup world where you’re running to make ends meet,” Bidenbender says. “At some point I realized I was pushing, pushing, pushing. You’ve just got to say, ‘Is money really the most important thing?’ It’s good, but it’s not the only thing.”
MAINTAIN YOUR VALUE: Toughing it out works in limited doses, but in the long term, the outcome is predictable. Bidenbender says that understanding your limits not only helps you avoid burnout, but makes you a better employee overall.
“Taking a timeout for yourself is helpful. If you’re not mentally there, then you’re just going to fail at everything,” he says. “Everybody’s got something that drives them. I like building new things, hustling, that type of thing, but family is the most important thing I can think of. I’ve got to set time aside for that in order to be happy.”
THROW NO ONE UNDER THE BUS And other essential career advice BY SCOTT SPRADLEY
My daughter recently graduated from college and my son from high school, and a lot of their friends have reached out and asked what advice I can share about these next stages of their lives.
I generally say, first, that I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved because I genuinely love doing what I do. It’s not a job for me. I like to play with technology, I like to play with people, I like to lead people. So I’m getting paid to do my hobby. And I don’t have a single day when I wake up and say, “Oh, God, I gotta go to the office today.” I don’t have that day. So it all starts with pursuing what is genuinely fun to you.
The second thing I would say is, expose yourself to a wide array of things. Just as coaches will tell you they prefer to recruit an athlete who played four or five sports and then settled on one, exposing yourself to different avenues of potential work is a great thing. My college major was political science, and I once thought being a lawyer would be cool. I loved reading law books, and I still will occasionally read case law, just because it’s fascinating to me. I love the details. I’m one of the few people who read manuals, but I read them cover to cover. When I buy a car, I read the whole thing, and then I know everything the car does. And the manual goes in the glove box and I’m the human manual for it.
But finding what you love is the first thing. Then once you find that, my next advice is, don’t rush. I see a lot of people thinking they’ve got to rush to the top. They believe they’re in competition with their peers, and they’re not. Your career’s going to find you as much as you find your career.
I think the biggest mistake people make is changing jobs for money. I once did that—I left a company because I got offered a considerably larger sum of money to go to work for another company. And, boy, I wasn’t there very long before I realized, “I don’t care how much money I’m making here, this is not what I like to do.” Huge mistake.
I ALSO HAVE some tactical advice that I give everybody—just three or four rules, and if you live by them, you’re always going to be fine.
First is never tell a lie. If you have to work to remember something, that’s probably not good. Things that really happen to you, you never forget. So always be honest. If you’re asked if you did something, and you did it, say, “Yes, I did.” If you’re asked and you didn’t do it, say, “No, I did not.” Do you know the answer to this? “No, I do not.” Is this your work? “No, it was the team’s work.” Always be very honest.
Two, never throw anybody under the bus, because you never know who’s going to be your manager. Years ago, Intel acquired a startup that I was at, and the guy who came in as the “integration manager,” who was my manager, was just brutal to me. I mean brutal. He hated how much they were paying me, he was disrespectful to me, he tore things up, slammed my laptop, he was just brutal.
Two years later, I found myself standing in his cubicle because I had become his manager’s manager. So he was sitting there looking up at me, and he said, “I suppose this is where the payback starts.”
And I said, “No, this is where I’m going to show you how to manage the way you want to be managed. I could easily come in here and be a jackass to you, but I’m just going to try to manage you the way most people want to be managed.” So the key rule is never throw anybody under the bus, and don’t disrespect anybody. Let people have dignity every day.
My third rule is, never breach a confidence. At some point you’re going to be exposed to something, and somebody’s going to say, “Hey, keep this between us.” Do that. Because sometimes people are going to set you up and see if you’re going to keep it to yourself or not.
I often give a speech about how information is like beer—how much can you handle? I’ll give you some information, and if you look like you can handle it, I’ll serve you a little bit more. But if I see you start mishandling it, then I’m shutting you down. So that’s another piece of advice I give.
Finally, don’t talk about things you don’t know about. Don’t try to purport value in areas that you don’t have value in—leave that for the person who does have value in it.
If you follow those rules, and if you’re doing what you love to do, you’re set up for a pretty darn good life.
FEARLESS INTELLIGENCE
Aptitude and attitude. An excellent combination for an exciting career in IT. See what these near peers – who are blazing trails at Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield – have to say about their journey so far.
Subham Sarkar – Associate Developer (2018 summer intern; hired in 2019, 2 promotions within 2 calendar years)
I was a part of the 2018 Arkansas Blue Cross internship program. It was an excellent experience to improve my skill set, professionalism and communication skills, to network with people and to build my resume. As a full-time employee, I learned to communicate better within teams, use time management in a fast-paced professional environment, and gained insight into the organization through luncheons with the vice presidents. Every day along the path, I learn something new about software engineering and emerging technologies, teamwork and how to face challenges and overcome them. That’s what makes this job so interesting and exciting.
Gerson Vasquez – Business Systems Analyst (hired as a claims review specialist in 2017, promoted to IS Configuration in July 2019)
I’ve always been fascinated with technology and how it has evolved through the years. I personally think that Arkansas Blue Cross is one of the best, if not the best company to work for in Arkansas. I have worked in a few departments and my co-workers and leaders have been amazing and helpful. The organization really cares about its employees and it shows. If you want to learn and grow in a company, this is a great field. You gain tremendous knowledge that can be applied in more than one department. IS is a field that will always keep you on your toes. You won’t get bored.
Jordan Stormo – Associate Developer (2019 summer intern, hired onto Outbound Data Integration team in 2020)
I was assigned to the Network Operations Center during the 2019 Arkansas Blue Cross Summer Internship program, where I helped research and prototype AIOps solutions (artificial intelligence for IT operations). I also cross-trained with the Virtualization Services team during their tech refresh. It was a great experience all around. If you plan to go into IT, my advice is to network with people of different backgrounds and apply for internships! It is an amazing opportunity to get some early experience. As an employee, I love the environment at Arkansas Blue Cross and the people on my team. There is such a wide range of knowledge.
